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From ``Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman'', by Richard Feynman, Copyright 1985, pg. 157-158. Dr. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, among other things, worked on the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, NM. He died in 1988.

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Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn't make any difference. I'd invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the other way]. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ``Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's two to one?''

I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, ``Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it's two to one is ...'' and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, ``Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?''

``Hah!'' I say. ``There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it.'' His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ``playing'' - working, really - with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

--http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu

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(no subject)

i went for a walk. i like walking since it provides me with an opportunity to think about things and it's a good way to feel good. walking feels good.

whilst walking, i was thinking about the things that interested me, and my relationship with these things since i'm not very driven to pursue things. this has been changing for the past couple of months, but the drive still isn't where it needs to be.

whilst thinking about these things, my subjective outlook on life changed, albeit only for a certain duration of the walk. let me first explain to you what i mean by my 'outlook on life'. whenever you go outside of your house or apartment, and you walk somewhere and just look at things, there is a certain feeling associated with that - the way you see everyday life. there is a feeling associated with that, but i get the impression that most people may not realize this because they feel this all the time. my arrogance in saying some people may not realize this comes from the fact that whilst i knew this, it wasn't the same as feeling it the way i did today.

so where was i, my outlook on life changed for a duration of my walk.

the time this happened was when i was thinking deeply about the things i was curious about, all the different things that fascinated me about everything and how i wasn't pursuing those interests.

so after about 10 minutes of walking and really thinking about these things as well as how and why i wasn't pursuing any of these interests, the way i looked at things changed.

i can't really describe the feeling very well, specially because it's a feeling, but i can go someway to describing it.

so when i looked up, my usual thoughts of viewing life and society as a projection of my thoughts towards myself, such as: hopelessness, distress and something uniformly grey was no longer there. 

i felt very bright and happy and this veil of grey with which i saw life was no longer there. when i saw the woman in her car with a green raincoat and her daughter, i didn't feel 'oh it's sunday, she's going to go home and do the things everyone else do and prepare to go to work tomorrow', i felt, 'fuck, i've been (involuntarily and helplessly) looking at life just one way, and there are many feelings and ways to look at things' (note: this is how i felt, not what i said, i didn't say anything to myself). and even though what i said about her going home and and doing whatever everyone else does may be true, the significance of what i felt was in that there are vastly different ways of looking at life, not in a describable way, but in a subjective feelings kind of way. something which i think can be changed by changing my life, in the same way that surrounding yourself with negative people and some of which will rub on to you.

sure, i knew that there were different ways of looking (meaning feeling) about life, and i'd felt what i felt today quite a few times before. i thought that it having happened today was critical in the the time that i occurred. a moment where i'm trying very hard to change my life and trying to find some direction in the way of 'how do i go about doing all these things i want to do?' and the ever elusive independence day.